DeQED: An Efficient Divide-and-Coordinate Algorithm for DCOP

This paper presents a new DCOP algorithm called DeQED (Decomposition with Quadratic Encoding to Decentralize). DeQED is based on the Divide-and-Coordinate (DaC) framework, where the agents repeat solving their updated local sub-problems (the divide stage) and exchanging coordination information that causes to update their local sub-problems (the coordinate stage). Unlike other DaC-based DCOP algorithms, DeQED does not essentially increase the complexity of local sub-problems and allows agents to avoid exchanging variable values in the coordinate stage. Our experimental results show that DeQED significantly outperformed other incomplete DCOP algorithms for both random and structured instances.